Resonance, J. B. Everett [the top 100 crime novels of all time txt] 📗

Chapter 16

Jillian blinked. White showed above her and all around.

 

Clouds.

 

Heaven.

 

The pounding in her head drove out thoughts of any such luck. She blinked with eyelids made of sandpaper. Her brain knew she was awake, but she didn’t know where.

 

And why couldn’t she move?

 

Another grainy blink revealed shadows in the endless white, lines coming to a crosspoint just up and to her right.

 

The metal structure draped in the white canvas that formed the gazebo top came into focus.

 

As she lifted her arm she felt a tug at the skin covering her hand, and figured it out just before she waved her arm into her line of sight.

 

An IV meant someone was here.

 

The memories swept quickly through her mind. Jordan putting her up on the gurney, after David hauled her out of the reversal. Becky being laid on the gurney next to hers.

 

With a shove and a groan, Jillian brought herself to her elbows. Only now beginning to catalog and question the eerie silence.

 

Extreme effort brought her to sitting, only to slump down quickly as she realized that she would pass right back out again. If not from lack of blood to her brain, then from the hideous pounding inside her skull. She recognized it as the cadence of her heart and for a few moments she counted, stopping only when she was confident she was at a nice stable seventy-two beats per minute.

 

She yanked her arm, forgetting why she had moved the moment the IV tugged at the back of her left hand, painfully taking tape and a little bit of precious skin. But the needle stayed put. Whoever had done it had done a good job.

 

While she took deep breaths and waited for her equilibrium to be restored, Jillian held the taped-up hand into her visual field.

 

Jordan had done it.

 

It was the first smile that cracked her face. She could feel the unused muscles as she stretched them, grinning as she recognized the careful pattern he always made securing IVs. Wide white paper tape. With three pieces neatly laid in rows holding the whole thing down. So you couldn’t rip it out. So it wouldn’t hurt so much.

 

She had to find Jordan.

 

Turning onto her stomach, Jillian paid careful attention to the tubing that fed her normal saline from the looks of it. But it wasn’t Becky Sorenson on the gurney that shared the corner with hers.

 

It was Jordan. Flat on his back. For a few heartstopping moments she waited, seeing if his chest would rise of its own accord. And when it did, her unfettered right hand snaked out to rest on his sternum, to buy reassurance that the one breath wasn’t a fluke. After riding several swells and troughs of his breathing, Jillian tried to jostle him awake.

 

“Jordan?”

 

It was nothing but a movement of her mouth; no sound escaped her vocal cords. Not even the whisper of a voice. It took three tries before she produced something akin to the hiss of a steampipe. And several more before she could recognize her own voice.

 

“Jordan?”

 

But he still didn’t respond. His chest kept rising and falling, but nothing else about him showed life. Her hand went to her front scrubs pocket out of habit, without her brain even being aware that it was there, until it grasped her penlight.

 

Jillian turned herself to the single-minded task of lifting his lids and watching the pupils focus automatically before the she allowed herself the sigh of relief that let out the tension and allowed a flood of thoughts of so many things that were not comforting.

 

Like the throb in her leg.

 

Like, where had Becky Sorenson gone? Was she awake?

 

How long had she been out?

 

Four days, like the guys in Nevada?

 

Her lips pressed a thin line. She had no idea.

 

But she was smart enough to put together the facts. Jordan was out cold beside her. There were no human sounds beyond the tent that she could distinguish. She had a slow dripping IV but Jordan didn’t even have a line. Surely he would have run one on himself if he could have. There were two plastic IV drip bags, lying like dead urchins on the counter. So he had enough saline, but maybe not enough time. But he was on the gurney. So he had enough time to get there, or someone had put him up there. But why hadn’t they run a line? Unless they couldn’t.

 

David!

 

“David!”

 

It was meant to be a yell, but it sounded like steam being released from a pan. With a deep breath she tried again, her eyes still square on Jordan’s face, waiting for any flicker of movement.

 

Her voice was loud enough the second time.

 

But David wasn’t around.

 

And apparently neither was anyone else. Someone should have answered that call. As inhuman as it might have sounded.

 

She tried a third and even fourth time before deciding that she was just wasting her throat. And that she needed a drink and clearly no one was going to show up and hand her one.

 

Long slow moments passed before she positioned herself to sitting, feeling her muscles stretch and react from their silent time on the gurney. She was guessing she’d been out well more than a day.

 

Her sneakered feet dangled over the side, swishing in time to the rhythmic pounding of her heart. The desire to find something positive was enough incentive. With eyes staring ahead she took deep breaths, getting her blood flowing again, her heart working a little harder to feed fluid to all the corners of a body that was no longer stationary but becoming fully mobilized.

 

Jillian inhaled deeply and thanked God that she had survived this … whatever it was. She knew already that many hadn’t, and many more wouldn’t.

 

She also gathered strength for the jump to the ground. Her legs would need to hold her when she hit bottom, and it wasn’t standard operating procedure at all to try this completely alone first time out of a coma.

 

But she had no options. No one had come when she called.

 

Which meant they were all under.

 

Or dead.

 

Or incapacitated to the point where they couldn’t answer back.

 

It was a shame that the last thought was about the most cheerful.

 

Jillian gathered the IV tubing, draping it to let out enough line in case her legs failed and she slipped all the way to the ground. Without looking down she moved her butt off the edge, feeling for the ground with her toe, but she didn’t find it. When her arms got too tired, she fell, her legs taking the brunt of the impact, and not well because she hadn’t been sure when it was coming. She crumpled, her feet slipping easily through the grass to splay out in front of her. Leaving her sitting with a sore butt, growing wet from the dew on the cold ground.

 

But she smelled something. Her eyes registered it before her brain matched the smell, her hand flying to her mouth.

 

Leon Peppersmith lay beside her, facedown and unmoving, with flies swarming in small patches. Her hand automatically made a brushing motion through the air, scattering them from their prey. And her fingers settled at his neck just under his jaw.

 

He was cold. He didn’t move, didn’t breathe. And the flies.

 

All of it told her he was dead, but her brain wouldn’t believe until she checked for herself.

 

But after a full minute of not finding a pulse she resigned to defeat, if not tears.

 

And her brain turned over.

 

The flies weren’t hatching on him. But there were plenty there, settling on him again from the moment she had abandoned her task of shooing them. She registered the handprints on him, marked in blood, the splay of long thick fingers.

 

Not Jordan’s.

 

Jordan had artist’s hands. He also would never have handled a man that way. The pattern suggested Leon was rolled and checked by a complete amateur; the handprints violated even the basics of any Red Cross first aid training.

 

The size, shape, and carelessness were David’s. Which meant he’d survived beyond Leon’s fall, long enough to roll him and check him. If David was truly immune, then where was he?

 

Jillian realized that she couldn’t just wait here gleaning tiny fragments of data from Peppersmith, that she had sat long enough to gather her legs and push herself to the standing position she had aimed for in the first place.

 

She rolled to her knees, using her hands splayed out on the grass to stabilize herself, and only as she grabbed the railing did she realize that it wasn’t just dew on the ground. The moisture had combined with Leon’s blood and congealed to a thick red mess that she was leaving all over the side of the gurney as she hauled herself up. A task made much more difficult by the fact that her hands were covered in the slimy sludge that had once fed Leon’s heart.

 

She wiped long red smears on her scrub pants, knowing without looking that the wetness on her butt wasn’t clear dew, but more of the same. With steady hands she lowered the IV pole and unwound the flattened bag from its holder at the top. Briefly she noted the masking tape and markings indicating the dose of Raglan that had been added for nausea. Jordan had thought ahead to when she would wake up. Carrying it with her, she went in search of a clean pair of scrubs.

 

As she cleared the front flap of the tent, she left its man-made heat and was smacked by the chill of the air, and the smears of white across the ground. Upon closer inspection they were what she had known all along, fallen doctors, techs, lab assistants.

 

Harder to see, but visible when her eyes cleared, were the black slashes – the suits.

 

There was no rank or privilege here. No one was spared. Unless maybe you counted the absent David.

 

Her feet began to work, her heart racing. There was no telling how many of them were alive, but they had been left out in the cold overnight. Probably over two nights. Maybe even three. In their comatose state, they might survive. Especially with IVs.

 

With the clarity afforded by a fresh rush of adrenaline, Jillian headed back into the tent. Her eyes scanning, taking in the IV bags and her jacket tossed over the back of a chair.

 

She slipped into the jacket, knowing every second she was on her feet would be helpful to those outside.

 

Unfortunately the IV tubing traced neatly up her sleeve and out the back of the jacket, at the base. At the neck it would receive the gravitational tug necessary to keep it dripping.

 

After a rapid search she found a safety pin and stared at it a second before shedding her jacket and pulling the tubing apart, shoving in the connection to a new, fuller, heavier bag. She pushed the pin through the wide hole at the top and attached it to the base of her jacket collar. Shrugging back into it, she felt the IV bag tugging slightly at the neckline, but it wasn’t much of a bother, knowing what it would help her accomplish. She loaded her pockets with supplies and went to work, Leon’s blood already crusting on her pants, forgotten.

 

Expanding her ribcage, she sucked in as much air as she could. Certain that the same place that had been so toxic to everyone no longer was to her.

 

Jordan was her first order of business. In short work, she propped him on his side, using the pillows from her bed and his. She used the same rubber tourniquet that he had used on